The final installment of our exclusive interview with Director/Storyboard Artist/Producer Jay Oliva wraps up the conversation regarding the making of the animated short that celebrates Superman’s 75th Anniversary. Things pick up with the conversation about the Man of Steel’s battle with Doomsday, and brings us all the way up to the final seconds that include the animated version of Henry Cavill and the logo DC created for the anniversary.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: I thought the animation in the battle between Superman and Doomsday was really effective.JAY OLIVA: I had worked on the Superman Doomsday animated film. I didn’t do the fight, but I had worked on it. I remember when I saw it, I thought, “Wow, that’s the Doomsday fight I had always envisioned in my head.” So when I was doing this sequence for the short, I thought I’d go watch that again to see if I could get anything from it and wrap my head around that whole era. All I had time for was three hits and that’s it, and I wanted a transition where Superman gets knocked into the camera and you have the Death of Superman cover.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Which leads to the other Supermen coming out of that cover.JAY OLIVA: We tried for a couple of different looks there with the black suited Superman and the red and blue Supermen. We also wanted to add the Superman magnet from Seinfeld’s refrigerator, but in the last minute we had to cut it just for time.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: I’m actually impressed you got everything you managed to in two minutes of animation.JAY OLIVA: Originally I don’t think they wanted to do the black-suited Superman; they wanted to go to Bruce’s version from the animated series and then Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come. I was, like, “No, we have to do the black suit. And the mullet!” To me, that was the era of the black suit Superman. Then, of course, it goes into Superman Red and Superman Blue. I actually opened the door for them, because when I put the Back Suit through, Bruce said, “If you’re going to do Black Suit, you might as well do Red and Blue,” and he was right. So we came up with this thing where Black Suit Superman explodes and then the split turns into the Red and the Blue, so the narrative rides visually. Even if you know nothing about the characters you can connect the fact that, oh, Superman came back and, oh, he’s two different guys. And then of course that transition leads us back to the classic of the Bruce Timm version.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: And the image of Superman standing there, from The Animated Series, it made people go crazy at Comic-Con.JAY OLIVA: You know what’s funny? This particular promotional image was something that they had done a long time ago, and James Tucker had actually drawn it and they used it for something — -James would probably know the story more than I do. But they had done it for some promo thing – I just remember seeing it on a Toon Zone magazine cover, and so on that presentation I told you about where they had all those landmarks, they had this image. I was like, “That’s the image!” So I thought in my mind when I was storyboarding, I’ll have Superman fly up, land into that shot, hold it, and then fly into the camera and use that as the next scene. I went to our archives and asked, “Do we have anything of the original artwork of this thing?” They didn’t. We couldn’t find any existing artwork of this piece, so we basically had to recreate this piece from images from the internet. I had to basically grab an image I found on Google search, I had to take Superman out of it, and figure out how he lands in that pose and come out of it. So this is all brand new, although technically it’s classic.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: What impressive is that the image is so sharp. And, of course, you were able to work in Lois, Perry and Jimmy.JAY OLIVA: That was a way we were able to get the cast in there — Ma and Pa Kent and everyone else is there. That leads us to the Smallville water tower. To people who said, “Where is Smallville?”, we got the tower in there, we put the logo on, and then you see the Alex Ross version come in…

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Which is the only piece that’s not animated, besides the cape.JAY OLIVA: Early on when we were making this, it eventually ended up being a lot bigger than it was originally conceived to be. As soon as Hans Zimmer got involved, it became its own kind of beast. It had a life of its own and went running amok, which is cool. I think what kind of got the ball rolling was this Alex Ross piece, because we were trying to figure out how to include him. I think I mentioned this at New York Comic-Con. People asked why don’t we do an animated version of Kingdom Come and we were saying it would be great, but it would take millions of dollars to do research and development, to try to figure out how to do the water color animation and everything, whether it’s 2D or 3D, or it looks like water color but it’s actually 3D. There’s a lot involved and it’s really hard to produce these films in the time we have. There’s no way to do it in the year or six months or three months we have for the development before we actually have to start. So when we knew we wanted to do this Alex Ross thing, we were thinking, “Why don’t we just take the Alex Ross artwork and then just scale it up?” So it’s a little bit of a cheat, and that was the original idea, so as soon as I start story boarding, I realized oh wait a minute, in the actual panel that they wanted to use, Superman is cut off, and the rest of the characters are cut off. How are we going to slide this, because we need him to fly into frame or something? A few ideas were thrown out, like maybe we get somebody to finish the artwork, that can do Alex Ross style, and then my character designer Dusty Abel said, “Why don’t we just ask Alex?” And we’re, like, “You have Alex’s number?” And Dusty said, “Sure, I’ll give him a call!

Remember, at this point we have no budget, so it’s not like we can call Alex and say, “Hey Alex, we’re going to pay you thousands of dollars to finish this image.” That’s why we tried to do everything on the cheap, because these shorts have very small budgets. If you think about it, these shorts aren’t really selling anything. It’s not like you’re going to pay a dollar for this, it’s really just a short to celebrate Superman – there’s no other use for it – and so Dusty calls Alex and Alex said he would love to. He said, “Give me some time, let me know when you need it,” and he painted this image. So we had this high-res image of this artwork – it’s a gigantic piece, and he actually painted the rest of this big metallic dude, I don’t know who the other characters are, but he finished the whole thing out. And he gave it to us in layers so we could scale it up, and do whatever we needed to. He knew we would animate the cape, and his hair’s got a little bit of animation. But for the most part it’s Alex Ross’ art. Here was one guy who was interested in collaborating with us, and that’s why when Hans and Zack got involved, that kind of helped; all these people started coming out to help, and to do whatever they could for this project.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Did Hans and John Williams get paid for this?JAY OLIVA: I think Hans got paid. That’s why our budget ended up getting a lot more inflated than we originally planned. I think as soon as Hans got involved, as soon as people saw what we had done from the animatic and the buzz around the studio, they started realizing that there was something special about this project. Remember, it was originally designed to be a DC Nation short. But as soon as they started to see just how cool it was with the John Williams music and everything we choreographed, they realized this was something special, and that maybe we should just see where this goes. Then Zack said he wanted to put it on the Man of Steel DVD as well, which was awesome, because, again, our original idea was that it would be on DC Nation on TV.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Up next is Darkseid and the New 52 Superman.JAY OLIVA: There was a conversation about this, where we knew we wanted to do the New 52 Jim Lee version. Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come version is technically a future version of Superman. If we were to go back to some other version, it would be kind of weird, plus the next benchmark or landmark we had to hit was New 52. There were a lot of great artists and stories that came out before that, like Red Son, and all these other kinds of stories that we were throwing around for a while, but ultimately we realized, Alex Ross was a nice capper of that age of Superman. The New 52 is the big thing right now, that’s what’s actually going on, and that kind of sparked the Man of Steel design, because we were redesigning it for a new kind of feel. So I had this idea: I just wanted Superman fighting Darkseid because we had just finished Justice League: War, and I thought, “Hey, I’m just going to have a Boom Tube open up and out of the Boom Tube comes the New 52 Superman, so tehnically it would be like you were coming from another dimension. Then Darkseid is following him, which leads into the slow motion punch and the “bullet time” kind of feel there. It lets you linger on that moment, because as much as people say, “Why don’t you make it look like Jim Lee?”, Jim Lee is really hard to animate. I think we did a good job in getting as close as possible, but for the most part he’s a tough designer to try to do.

VOICES FROM KRYTPON: I love the fact that it bookends; that you start with the Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster version, obviously the very first interpretation, and you end with the New 52, which is the latest interpretation.JAY OLIVA: Which was the kind of narrative I was trying to get across, because remember early on you have much more fanciful characters like Turtle Boy and Brainiac, and Bizarro, Super Family, but then as soon as you get to Doomsday and the change with Hans Zimmer, the mood changes, and what’s a better way to culminate the Superman story? You have to culminate with Darkseid. That’s just how it is. And it was funny, because I knew I was going to transition from New 52 Superman into Henry Cavill, and so I thought, “How do I get Henry?” I wanted to do the scene where he gets thrown into the vault, because that was the promo image they released, and for the longest time people were fixated on it. Everyone knows what that image is, and so I thought it would be kind of cool if Superman gets hit by an Omega Beam and we just use that as a transition. So I set it up that Superman punches Darkseid, Darkseid hits him with the Omega Beam , we then transition off of that action onto the Man of Steel footage, which is also funny because the Smallville sequence was one of the first scenes I storyboarded for Zack. I took my storyboard from Man of Steel – it’s in the animatics if you’ve ever seen the animatics – and I just had to animate him hitting the bank vault. I tried to combine what was originally in the storyboard and then the promo piece, where he falls off the vault, and as he stands up I had him go right into the pose of Henry, that we have in the promo piece, and I figured we would have him fly into camera, and that would be our transition.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: And then we get our final few seconds where he flies and lands on the giant 75, hands on hips.JAY OLIVA: I always had this idea of him flying up and flying over the 75 as the 75 is going into place. He flies up into the air, with the sky the way it is, it’s kind of a new dawn, because it’s a new dawn of an era of this character, and then he lands on it, and we pull out and he’s standing on the 75, to kind of end that way.

VOICES FROM KRYPTON: And the whole thing ends with the 75th Anniversary logo, his cape flapping. And immediately after watching the short, I went down to the dealer’s room and bought myself a shirt with that logo.JAY OLIVA: Did you buy the shirt? Nice!VOICES FROM KRYPTON: I had to!JAY OLIVA: I saw it there; I should have bought one, too. Because now when you see it, it reminds you of the short. It’s funny, because they showed us that logo early on in the process, and we couldn’t figure out how to get that into our short. We were thinking, maybe we would just copy the font of the 75 years, but there’s no way we can do this Superman thing, and then as I was storyboarding it out, I realized, at the very end, when Superman lands and it goes away from camera, we fade off Superman but we keep the 75, and then the 75 turns into the logo. It worked out really well. The whole thing worked out really well.